SciFi Art Now is a book collecting some of the best in contemporary science fiction art by a wide range of creators. The book, edited by John Freeman, includes an introduction by the legendary Chris Foss and is on sale now in all good bookshops.

Sunday, 10 June 2012

Max Bertolini, one of the contributors to SciFi Art Now, has had a long, varied and successful career. The image I've featured here - 'Megara,' the cover for the January 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction - was shortlisted for a British Science Fiction Association Award in 2005.

Born in 1967 in Milan, where he lives and works, Max didn't attend art school and his skills are self taught. As a child, he was fascinated by American superhero comics, and the fantasy and science-fiction art he saw on magazines and book covers. But what finally pushed him to life as an artist was the first issue of Nathan Never when it was published by Sergio Bonelli Editore in 1991.

The cover was a revelation for Max, because it combined his old love of science fiction and the Italian adventure comic book genre, and prompted him to send a few illustrations of Bonelli¹s comic book hero to the publisher. Bonelli soon responded, and he has been drawing Italy's best known and best-selling comic serial since 1993. More recently, he's provided some stunning covers for Marvel Comics, featured here in our quick interview with the artist published in 2010.

After a few years working in comics, he began to feel they weren¹t enough for him and started a second career in illustration, his art reflecting a strong concern for the beauty of naked human form, his work encompassing almost every genre, from from fantasy to science-fiction, passing through horror and thriller.

Max says he enjoys depicting far alien landscapes and, as the illustration I've featured here illustrates, they are one of the distinctive features of his art, together with his fascinating and graceful warrior women, all of them represented with a deep consideration for contrast and chiaroscuro.

Max is one of the cover artists of Eura Editoriale and Mondadori, the main Italian publishing house, while in the evenings he even finds the time to teach Cartoon and Illustration at the Accademia dello Spettacolo in Milan.His work is known all over the world with his fantasy and sci-fi cover published in the US, France, Germany, Spain, England, Russia and China.

For anyone interested in Max's art, you might want to try and track down a copy of Revelations: The Art of Max Bertolini, a 128-page hardcover art book published in the UK by Paper Tiger, which collects the best of his work. German publisher MG Publishing has also published another art book featuring his art entitled, simply,The Art of Max Bertolini.

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About Sci-Fi Art Now

Sci-Fi Art Now is a book collecting some of the best in contemporary science fiction art by a wide range of creators. The book, edited by John Freeman, includes an introduction by the legendary Chris Foss, published in the UK by ILEX and in the US by Harper Collins.

A full list of artists featured, together with links to their web sites, appears below.

Chris Foss

Chris Foss provides the introduction for Sci-Fi Art Now, an artist who has had an immense impact on our collective vision of the future down the years, as cover artist for many SF books written by authors such as Harry Harrison, Philip K Dick, Isaac Asimov and E.E. 'Doc' Smith'; and his design work for films such as Alien and Superman.